Uganda's Kibale National Park can be a rough place these days. Several thousand villagers were recently evicted from their homes inside the park's boundaries, tossed out by para-military park rangers with AK-47s. The rangers are zealous in hunting suspected poachers and protecting the park boundaries. As a trespasser, I was slightly nervous about whether my own skin was now at risk.

My cameraman and I had sneaked into the park with some of the former villagers, hoping to see the remnants of their torched homes. As we crunched through the waist-high grass, I asked my translator if we were safe. He repeated my question with apparent amusement to some of the local folks walking with us. They all cackled and shook their heads. "Don't worry," he said. "We all know: where there is a white man, there is security. We are all safe. The rangers don't dare give us any problems."

Frankly, I can understand why so many Africans have mixed feelings about Sept. 11. Ordinary Africans live and die like flies. They feel momentarily safe from war, disease, corruption, only when some white person -- a "mzungu", in the local language -- turns a momentary interest their way, sheltering them briefly under the umbrella of the all-protecting beige fleshtone. And then afterwards, they resume their quiet misery -- slipping anonymously back into the darkness of constant mortal danger.

It must feel good to see us smug whiteys take the heat, for once.

I was flat on my back, last Sept. 11, longing for my head to stop pounding, my sodden nose to dry up and for my fever to drop back below the point at which spontaneous human combustion becomes a genuine risk to health. I had the flu, in other words. Not a very exotic illness for a guy living in Africa, but there you go.

I think it was late afternoon when my mobile phone rang. My house is on a hill in the Kampala suburb of Makindye. It sits on about an acre of garden, full of birds and flowers. It's a very peaceful and quiet place, with a gentle, cool breeze always blowing through. Now everything was gloomy from the setting sun, and my head was foggy with fever and sleep.

I picked up the phone and heard my colleague Dan Kalinaki give me the lowdown: "Jumbo jets have rammed both towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon is on fire, and they've evacuated the White House." I laughed. Dan and I are always calling each other with fake "breaking news" tips. But Dan wouldn't relent. "C'mon Murray, just turn on your TV!" I didn't want Dan to make me the sucker, and after a few minutes more I hung up on him. Dan was still pleading for me to turn on the television.

I waited 30 minutes before finally giving in. And there it was -- an American apocalypse. For the next two days, I lay on my couch in the living room in front of the television, moving only for bathroom breaks and to fetch more water. With the fever and my fitful dozing, the unfolding commentary of the disaster -- on CNN and BBC -- mingled with my dreams and became mangled in my consciousness. It was surreal, of course.

In Uganda, there was shock and surprise. Men and women here line up for hours, even days, trying to secure a visa from Kampala's fortress-like U.S. Embassy. Everything about America says, to most Africans, impenetrable. Economically, culturally, militarily…

After the surprise and the excited cafe talk, there emerged a grim kind of satisfaction among many people. Pictures of bin Laden were briefly sold in the taxi parks and at the local markets. Embarrassed police officials ordered the photos confiscated, but you can still find them occasionally. Even now, some wag will holler, "Go Osama!" when he spies a white guy in the street.

Nobody here really supports bin Laden, or even knows what he stands for. But after years of suffering, many Africans harbour a deep and profound bitterness against the West. This feeling is twisted by a simultaneous wish to live in the West, to have what the white man has: health, safety and power. Not quite envy, but something else. Most Africans long to live in societies which emulate the ideals of the West, and they don't understand why the West won't help them.

The resentment was clear at a rally by Kenyan Muslims opposing the war in Afghanistan: "Somalia has lost millions! The Congo has lost three million!! Rwanda has lost almost a million! What are we talking about here?" one man said to me. "Even if the Americans have lost, let them recognize also that we have lost."

"We are so angry because of the American double standard," another man told me. Millions of innocents die in lousy African conflicts that don't even make the back pages of U.S. newspapers. But when a few thousand Americans die, the world is plunged into war.

If you want to know how Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe gets away with what he does, where the fuel for that racial fire comes from, look no further than the pages of our own Canadian newspapers. As much as I argue the opposite with my Ugandan friends, I have to confess I don't believe the West would much care about Mugabe's land seizures, if the folks losing everything were brown instead of white. Much, much worse is going on right now, this moment, around the continent, and nothing is done, few reports are published, and no plans hatched for sanctions.

In the end, what really twists the knife is how much faith people in Africa place in the West. In East Africa, white people are automatically trusted. They're thought to be honest, and their countries considered models of real freedom and prosperity.

Yet in the same breath as so many Africans bitterly praise Osama or curse the "war on terror," they also beg the question: "Why doesn't the West help us?" "Why don't people in your country care about us?"

It's no wonder one year after the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., Africa remains the jilted continent. Africa loves the West, but we love only ourselves.